PW got it wrong. The
Washington Post praised the very thing that
worried PW, saying the book "brilliantly challenges
the simplistic focus on racism, violence and
exploitation." The Economist, which is just
as skittish as the Post about "racism," said
Empire is "a model of how to do popular history."
Even the New York Times seemed to be reevaluating
empire in the light of current US adventures abroad. In
April, it opened the Sunday magazine to Professor
Ferguson for a
piece urging Americans towards benevolent
imperialism.

At its peak in 1918, the British
ruled one quarter of the earth's surface and 440 million
subjects. Theirs was, by far, the greatest empire the
world has ever seen, and it captured the
energies and imaginations of generations of Britons.
Professor Ferguson's history of the imperial adventure
is admirably clear and engaging. He has struck just the
right balance between politics and economics on the one
hand, and swashbuckling exploit and piquant detail on
the other. (Lord Kitchener the military hero, for
example, was such a bad shot he named his gun dogs Bang,
Miss, and Damn).

This is the perfect volume with
which to tie down those free-floating bits of British
history Americans can't quite place: Who was in the
black hole of Calcutta and why? Did the British really
execute an admiral so as to, as Voltaire put it,
"encourager les autres."
Who were the
fuzzy wuzzies? Was the
sepoy rebellion really about animal fat? It's all
here, deftly explained and supported by a wealth of
illuminating illustrations.

But Professor Ferguson wants to do
more than tell a good story. He wants to ask big
questions: Was the empire a good thing? How did the
British manage to rule the world? Is America the next
imperial power?

He is refreshingly free of
anti-imperial prejudice, and answers the first
question with a thumping "yes." "No
organization has done more to impose Western norms of
law, order and government around the world,"
he writes, adding that the British brought free trade,
investor protection, and a colonial civil service that
was virtually incorruptible. It is a pleasure to read a
Brit who does not apologize for his ancestors.

But the fact remains that Ferguson
has gotten away with praising empire, not merely because
the idea is now convenient to the American ruling class,
but in large part because he resoundingly condemns the
sentiments that made empire possible. He cannot conceal
his admiration for conquest, but frets about what drove
the conquerors.

Alfred Milner, a colonial
administrator and later a Viscount,
spoke for many:

"My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial
limits. I am an imperialist and not a Little Englander
because I am a British race Patriot. It is not the soil
of England . . . which is essential to arouse my
patriotism, but the speech, the traditions, the
spiritual heritage, the principles, the aspirations, of
the British race . . . ."

Cecil Rhodes, who wanted the flag
flying from Cape Town to Cairo, was even blunter: "We
are the first race in the world, and the more of the
world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race."

Professor Ferguson is embarrassed
by this sort of talk. But without it there would have
been no empire.

The dilemma for half-way
imperialists like him is neatly captured in what came to
be known as the "white mutiny." In 1880 the
Marquess of Ripon was appointed viceroy of India,
and arrived full of the progressive ideas then
circulating in London. He found that Indian magistrates
could not preside over criminal trials of British
defendants: only a white man could pass judgment on
another white man. This offended Ripon, who
decreed equal competence of magistrates without
regard to race.

Old India hands, some of whom had
served for generations, were outraged. They refused to
give up an essential distinction between rulers and
ruled. Their resistance was so determined and bitter
that the question raised a storm even back in England.
The result was compromise: Indians would judge whites,
but only before a jury composed of a majority of whites
(Americans could serve, too).

The entire debate was an
unnecessary mistake. Ripon's blundering liberalism
forced the British to make explicitly racial arguments
about the necessity of maintaining the color line. A
custom of long standing, quietly taken for granted,
became a grievance for natives only after it was held up
to the light and defended in frankly imperial terms.
"Quite unintentionally," writes Professor
Ferguson, "Ripon
had brought into being a genuine
Indian national consciousness."

And yet he takes Ripon's side! He
does not seem to understand that dominion is, by its
very nature, the practice of inequality. One cannot both
admire empire and deplore the methods it requires.

The
"white mutiny" was part of a pattern. The
authorities in London - naïve and
far from the scene - increasingly tried to peddle
liberal notions to people whose livelihoods and even
lives depended on the unsentimental enforcement of
inequality. Whether it was stern repression of black
insurrection, or protecting
Hindus and their unsavory customs from meddling
missionaries, the men on the ground were invariably more
hard-headed than the ones back home.

As Thomas Munro, governor of
Madras, wrote in 1813:

"I have no faith in the modern doctrine of the
improvement of the Hindus, or of any other people. When
I read, as I sometimes do, of a measure by which a large
province has been suddenly improved, or a race of
semi-barbarians civilized almost to Quakerdom, I throw
away the book."

Empire was doomed, of course, when
the Ripons began to outnumber the Munros and the Milners.
The British lost their conviction of superiority, and
therefore their ability to act firmly.

Adolph Hitler, rather more a Rhodes
than a Ripon, once explained to then-Foreign Secretary
Lord Halifax, that the way to put down the Indian
independence movement was to
shoot Gandhi, and if that didn't work, to
keep shooting activists until the movement died out.

The British did not shoot Gandhi,
and India was independent a few years later. Perhaps
Lady Mountbatten's
affair with Nehru is the best symbol of the change
in mentality from
"rule Britannia" to today's limp-wristed
"cool Britannia." No true daughter of empire would
have dreamed of having it off with a native just as her
husband, the final viceroy, was handing over the jewel
in the imperial crown.

It is true, as Professor Ferguson
points out, that Britain had been drained economically
by two world wars, was more interested in paying for a
welfare state than for a colonial army, and dared not
defy the anti-imperial United States. Still, the end of
empire was a failure of will, a psychological
capitulation, more than anything else.

It is the same failure of will that
now offers up Britain as a target of colonization for
millions of Indians, Pakistanis, and
West Indians. The empire, based as it was on British
superiority, kept the subject peoples literally in their
places. Now, after it is gone, they are streaming in,
shaking the country to its foundations. This is the
sorry fag end of empire on which Professor Ferguson is
silent: the British, who carried their flag around the
world, cannot now
summon the will even to keep the home islands
British - an outright reversal of imperialist thinking
that this book does not even begin to explore.

And will the United States take up
the
white man's burden? None dares call it that, of
course, but Professor Ferguson suggests that is what it
amounts to. Professor Ferguson argues that there are
still weak nations that need guidance and standards that
must be imposed, and that the Yanks are perfect for the
job.

Of course, the United States is
even more of a
colony of the world than is Britain. Whatever
attempts at empire it undertakes will increasingly
reflect the desires of whichever interest group has its
hands on the levers of power.

With their combination of
hucksterism, idealism, and naïveté, Americans are not
cut from imperial cloth, and if it leads to the mental
collapse from which the
British now suffer, we must avoid it at all costs.